BioCatalogue is a UK project, started in May 2008, between the myGrid team at the University of Manchester and the EMBL-EBI to build and maintain a comprehensive, curated catalogue of Web Services for the Life Sciences community.
biocatalogue.prg is the place where scientists, developers and Web Service providers will find:
- Well described and factual information and documentation about services.
- Information about their volatility and changes in implementation, location and capabilities.
- The catalogue is for both casual as well as expert users, tool developers and service providers.
Is BioCatalogue a registry or a repository?
The BioCatalogue is a registry of Web Services, providing documentation, location, annotations… for these services.
The Web Services themselves will not be hosted on the website.
Why do we need the BioCatalogue ?
There is a bewildering number of services to retrieve and carry out on-line analysis of data in modern bioinformatics. There are currently more than 900 databases and some 200 web servers around the world and an increasing number of these are providing access and tools using Web Service Interfaces. These are typically SOAP and REST interfaces but also data driven services such as DAS are on the uptake. These interfaces are becoming critical to the effective linking of biological data and data resources.
Although there are several on-line registries of these services, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find these. There is no central place for these to go that comprehensively catalogues them in a manner that is intuitively easy and where minimal information about their function and scope is maintained.
The aim of the BioCatalogue is to become this central place.